Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

There was no mention of Rogelio, or of the prison. No mention of the real reasons Henry felt so drawn to this place he’d never visited before. Up until that point, Patalarga, Henry’s best friend and confidant for more than two decades, had never heard the name Rogelio in his life.

I wondered: Did either Patalarga or Nelson ask for any further explanation from Henry?

“No,” the servant told me. “He was the president.”

They left San Jacinto the next morning. “Fuck you, Roosevelt!” Henry is reported to have shouted from the bus window as it pulled out of the station, though Patalarga was surely more diplomatic when he called to cancel their performance at the English language academy.

Once in T—, what Diciembre noticed first about the town was what anyone would notice, what I noticed every time I visited: the abundance of empty, shuttered houses, roughly half on any given block. Every building, with the exception of the municipal offices, needed a new coat of paint. The town was surrounded on all sides by yellow-green hills that seemed almost lush for this altitude, hills which were themselves dwarfed by jagged snowcapped peaks, so appropriately cinematic that they appeared to have been painted along the horizon by a set designer. If the town itself was notable only for its charming abandonment, the valley where it was placed was one of the loveliest they’d ever seen. That contrast — the spareness of the town and the majesty of its surroundings — made T— seem even smaller and more insignificant than it was. Something similar might be said of many mountain villages, I suppose, but the sense was somehow sharper here, that feeling of isolation, the illusion of being outside time.

Like many settlements one comes across in the highlands, T— was a village without men. Nelson, age twenty-three, Patalarga, forty, Henry, forty-six — Diciembre had essentially no contemporaries. I feel the same absence whenever I visit. There were children; there were elderly; and there were a handful of adolescent boys, who were, in many ways, a species apart: restless, unpleasant, wearing expressions Henry recognized them from his past. “They were like inmates hatching escape plans,” he told me. Rogelio had been one of them — that much was clear to Henry the moment he stepped off the bus from San Jacinto and saw the boys waiting in the plaza. They had a hunger in them, the same desire that had sent Rogelio to the city, pushing him along the accidental and luckless path that ended at Collectors prison, when he was only twenty-one.

Illiterate, hopeless, frightened. Far from home.

T—’s plaza was simple, relatively well tended, and picturesque: the two-story city hall stood on the east side, adorned with a fluttering flag; across from it was the stone cathedral, the oldest, and still the tallest, structure in the area, its empty niche filled once a year for the September festival of the town’s patron saint. There were a few shops along the north end, businesses with spare, dusty shelves, whose doors opened and closed according to a schedule the actors of Diciembre never managed to comprehend. The hotel, called the Imperial, stood along the southern side of the plaza. It had three rooms, each with a couple of saggy twin beds. For Diciembre’s stay, the owner brought in a third, crowding the room so completely that there was hardly any space to walk. The hotel also housed the town’s only restaurant and its only bar, a pleasant balcony where I spent many evenings admiring the sleepy square. My favorite moment of each day came just after sunset, as daylight vanished behind the ridge to the west, and the plaza’s four streetlamps came on. These tiny blooms of orange light warmed me somehow — they were so small, and the dark so immense. I liked to sit and watch them for long stretches, taking in the view of a plaza where nothing at all ever seemed to happen. I’ll admit: the same oppressive calm I’d found maddening as a child had become almost charming.

But what does nothing look like?

A stooped elderly couple ambles by, casting soft shadows beneath these minuscule lights. They are trailed by their grandchildren, or a skinny dog; or perhaps they are alone, walking very close together to stay warm. The wind picks up, and later the moon begins to rise. Soon there will be stars dotting the sky. T— is just like this, night after night — this quiet, this peaceful, this harmless. It was just like this when Nelson and Henry and Patalarga arrived. And it was probably just like this when Nelson was made to stay.

ROGELIO’S MOTHERlived four blocks from the plaza, on the west bank of the river that ran through town. Her home, I should mention, was across the street from the house where I was born. On those periodic trips back, I would sometimes see her, and she seemed ancient to me even then. About our house: it sat empty for more than two decades, until December 2000, when my parents finally tired of life in the capital. My sisters and I were grown, and my mother and father could be comfortable again in T—. Live quietly; cheaply, though with relatively few comforts. They sold the house in the city, and went home, to confront their nostalgia head-on. They were happy to be back, and encouraged us to visit often. My sisters had their families now, their partners and children a ready excuse. I was the youngest. Unattached. The pressure to go fell mostly on me.

“Come home,” my father would say when we spoke, though I had never really thought of T— as home.

Regarding Rogelio’s mother, my old man confessed to me: “I couldn’t believe she was still alive.”

For Henry, the bus ride from San Jacinto was itself an act of bravery, a confrontation with a specific well of fear he’d avoided since the day he woke to the news that his old block in Collectors was burning down, with everyone inside. What is more frightening than our past? Than true love, snatched away? He wasn’t fooled by the town’s peaceful exterior. To him, T— was vacant, a kind of still life, waiting to be animated by his presence. He’d hardly slept the night before, overwhelmed by the sense that a reckoning was imminent.

T— was just as he imagined it would be, or like a museum of itself. Henry checked into the Imperial, and left immediately to look for his lover. He saw traces of Rogelio everywhere: a child has dragged a muddy set of fingers along the white stucco of an exterior wall; they extend nearly fifteen paces, in fading, vaguely parallel lines. Rogelio? Of course not, but still, the very idea filled Henry with expectation. He asked the occasional passerby for Rogelio’s family home, and was met, more often than not, with blank stares. He couldn’t remember Rogelio’s surname; he wondered, in fact, whether he’d ever known it at all. Those he met were friendly enough, but most claimed ignorance, or gave him obscure directions that seemed designed to confuse. He entered a few of the open shops, and inquired there, with about as much luck. With every interaction, his anxiety rose, but he didn’t give up. Finally, after a half hour of wandering, looking for a sign, he stopped an elderly woman in a purple shawl, hoping she might be Rogelio’s mother. She seemed about the right age (though actually he had no idea), and in truth, that was the entirety of his logic. He all but babbled his story, or some version of it, to this startled stranger, who was surprisingly patient, nodding at Henry, as if urging him to go on. (Who this woman in the purple shawl might have been, I can’t say with any certainty.) In any case, she wasn’t kin to Rogelio, she said, but she knew him. And his family. And his mother, who — God bless! — was still alive.

“Oh yes, and her name is Anabel,” the elderly woman added, voice trembling. She pointed a thin, bony finger in the direction of the river, and sent the grateful visitor on his way.